First off, HUGE kudos to @pdwhite. I build hardware products for a living and I could not be more impressed with this kit so far. The quality of the parts is incredible, and even the packaging was great. For a couple guys in a basement/garage, I’m astounded! The community owes you bigtime!

Nice one Dave! It looks a really straight forward build, I’m not sure how close you are to the wiring stage, but are you soldering wires together or crimping? Thanks for showing what you’ve done so far.

wiring starts today :). It will likely be a combination of solders and crimps. Motors and ESCs have great bullet connectors with them, which will be soldered on. The Big battery connector XT150 and XT90 are solder I hope to crimp for the power switch and over time add a bus bar for distribution and bolt/crimp for that. Will include closeups as I do those.

It’s essentially aluminum bar stock (decided to go with that vs copper since it’s lighter and easier to get), some copper lugs for battery connections and ring terminals for the wires to the ESCs.

All of the parts were available from Home Depot which was handy :). I’ll do some resistance measurements once it’s complete. Certainly easier to tweak than a big ball of solder wire harness. We’ll see…

The bus bars are isolated using polycarbonal standoffs. It’s “proof of concept” quality at the moment, but should all function fine. The positive rail will get capped or wrapped so that random metal bits in the field don’t short things out.

A few things came to mind: Make sure those ring terminals are up to the current asked of them. and 2) it is unusual to use nylock for an electrical connection. I think it will work, but not convention as the nylon could melt if the connection got hot.

Yeah, thought about both of those. The rings are designed for the gauge of wire being used by the motor controllers - so I’m hoping someone at the ring terminal factory did the math

And, yes, nylock nuts are not typically used in electrical applications, but most electrical applications don’t fly I have lock washers and nuts that I could swap out, but lock nuts are just so much easier. If the connection gets hot we have fundamental issues. I’ll be doing a lot of static load/endurance tests before I actually fly this thing, and will be measuring temp as well of everything.

So, yeah, I did do a first pass assembly without doing any of the wiring. I wanted to make sure I had all the pieces (which it turns out I didn’t, missing a few screws) and was also eager just to see the whole thing together. I also wanted to see how the hoop fit together, etc.

That being said, once you know what you’re doing, it’s much easier to do all the wiring with the thing apart